Anyone Sick of Being Told They're Not Autistic?

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I know that question seems odd, but I really do associate with autism quite strongly and proudly, and was formally dx'ed as a child, yet my therapist and rx doctor both seem to think I'm not autistic. Is anyone else so mildly autistic that others respond similarly (i.e. "I don't think you're autistic") when you say you're autistic? Even medical professionals who should be able to discern this type of thing from the norm pretty well by now?

my psychiatrist says i am very obviously autistic and i feel the same. my family refuses to accept it. i am mostly estranged from them all now but when i do talk to them i dont even bring it up because i know they think i just got diagnosed for attention or to come up with an excuse for my history of bratty and awkward behavior.

That's interesting that your psychiatrist thinks your "obviously" autistic, but your family couldn't disagree more. I know what it's like to have family treat you like it's just an excuse or for attention; not first-hand, of course - my ex was convinced for years that she was autistic and actively sought a diagnosis, finally getting as much as a social anxiety disorder dx at age 20. Her family was never sympathetic nor understanding about it, and thought she was just a brat and a wuss and a weirdo. We understood each other pretty well though. It's tough thinking about her nowadays (I really miss her), but I guess I'll move on. Anyways, to sum up again, I kind of understand what you mean, but it's still pretty interesting.

My mom says I am not true Aspergers and I only have it when I am anxious or nervous and then she says I only have anxiety. She can't make up her mind. Then she says I have traits but not enough to be an aspie and then she says it doesn't fit. It drives me crazy and it makes me think I imagined my childhood and lying to myself and making everything up and it feels invalidating, especially when she denies my symptoms so it makes me think I am imaging those symptoms. It makes me think kids were right and I really was weird and I really was mean and rude and not a good person and everything was my fault and my mom says I was just too sensitive. She has acted like it's a true diagnoses and then she acts like it's a fake diagnoses that was given to me so we could cheat the school system so I could get though school and that makes me feel like a fraud like I didn't deserve the credit to graduate and don't deserve to have my job or to even be on SSDI and I just need to toughen up and be stronger and to quit taking away services from people who actually need it. But my husband thinks I am genuine and I am not faking anything and I am not a fraud and my mom is only thinking that because I am her daughter so I will always be perfect under her eyes. She also denied she ever told me I had Asperger's. Talk about gas lighting.

But yet a few years ago she mentions I have it and was like "you have it, big f*****g deal." That doesn't help with my OCD at all so it makes me obsess about if my childhood was real and if I am imagining these incidents that happened when I was a kid and then I wonder if it was just my upbringing hat did it and if I was just abused by my peers so it made me act aspie. But my dad will say I have AS because I have over heard him say to a parent about me having it because I had socialization issues when they were talking about her son and he has told me a few years ago how this private school denied me because of it when they tried putting me in it.

If you were to hear my mom's version she will call it anxiety. Then when she isn't talking about anxiety, she just says "disability." To me that validates me because it means it's not in my head.But she has accused me of putting the AS label on myself. Uh she told me I had it, I was given the diagnoses so how did I put this on myself? Was it just a coincident when I was reading about it for the first time and it sounded like it fit and was my childhood a coincidence that made it sound like it fit? It made me feel better about myself and I stopped hating myself for things I did as a child and I started to forgive myself and it helped me understand why I was rejected and treated different and why I saw double standards and why I was confused about rules and why it was so hard to figure them out and trying to be normal. I thought I was just a bad kid so I was trying to better myself and working on my behavior to be a better person as a preteen but if it's not Asperger's, then it would mean I was right the first time about myself and the other kids were right about me. Then I read online by people who don't like the self diagnoses that some people put this label on themselves to excuse their failures and why kids were mean to them so they feel better about themselves and I never applied that to me because I am not self diagnosed. But then I wonder if I applied it to myself despite the diagnoses for this so I can feel better about myself because my mom said I put the label on myself.

But seriously if I weren't diagnosed, I wouldn't be claiming to be aspie or having an ASD because I am not a textbook case and I might have just thought I had symptoms and that's it. I honestly keep thinking about undiagnosing myself and no longer identifying myself as an aspie. But last time I did that, my mom was like "you don't think you have Asperger's?" and then trying to remind me about having it when she had told me I didn't have it. Plus my therapist in high school thought I was in denial of having it so I refused to believe him for a while I wasn't reading social cues or not following the rules of a social conversation and now I am thinking what if he just made that assumption because of the diagnoses because I had read online how once you have a diagnoses, doctors start making assumptions about you and blaming stuff on it and not take you seriously. But yet my mother would tell me the opposite about kids in my high school than what my therapist would tell me. It was so confusing. Then I find out parents tend to be more bias about their children so maybe that is what was going on with my mother. I can do no wrong and I am so perfect and normal under her eyes and it's everyone else's fault.

Now I am scared about my mother having narcissist tenancies because I have read similar s**t online by people who went through a similar thing but their experience was the opposite. They just happened to be normal kids but were lied to about having mental disorders or being told they are autistic and their parents telling everyone they are that only to find out they were normal the whole time. One of them even wrote how her "autistic symptoms" went away after she left her toxic family so that makes me think what if I was just in a toxic environment as a child? That would explain why people don't treat me like s**t anymore and maybe my last work environment was toxic and I was just being abused and gaslighted by office clerks than having impairments. Ugh this all drives me crazy. I feel like a fake and that I had been lying over the years.

League_Girl,

That's all pretty messed up. Sorry you had to deal with that. It's hard when you receive a diagnosis in spite of having very mild behaviors associated with Asperger's, and having family members that really seem to make an effort to not understand or sympathize. I hope at some point though, you are able to reconcile it.

Another thing that bothers me is posthumous labels (or lack-thereof). Take Glenn Gould, for example. People speculate that he was on the spectrum, but no professional will likely tell you that he actually was on it (with the possible exception of Michael Fitzgerald, of course), because everyone is so hesitant to do so - even though he so clearly was on it.* I mean, I suppose it could have been some sort of other psychopathology that explained his eccentricities, but I rather doubt it. I think people have just conjured up an image of low-functioning autistics in their minds so well that when they think of somebody as successful and remarkable as Mr. Gould, they think "Well, he couldn't have actually been autistic! It's just a remote possibility, right?" Which is absurd - do they not think of Temple Grandin in moments like that? Ugh, it just drives me insane!

*I realize also, that the only way to make a confirmed diagnosis is during one's lifetime, so that's why it's all purely speculative, not simply because people refuse to believe that he really could have been autistic. Still, it's a little weird to me.

She used to tell me all the time in 8th grade "That's part of Asperger's" and then she stopped when I got to high school and then it all became anxiety because she started to call it all that and then rarely used the other word. I don't know what changed. Then sometimes she acts like I actually have AS when she mentions it and the other day she mentioned "disability" when we were talking about a story I wrote in 4th grade and she felt the student teacher didn't give me credit for it and she criticized it because "it wasn't part of the assignment." She gave me a picture of a jewelry store and it had been broken into and told me to write about what I think happened in it and that was the assignment for everyone in my class. But she didn't tell me how many pages she wanted, she only told me to write about what I think happened and it turned into a story for me while other kids only wrote a couple pages. So I maybe took her instructions too literal because she didn't tell me how many pages it had to be. I am surprised she didn't use the word anxiety. And luckily I didn't pick up on the criticism because I thought it was a compliment she wrote on my paper but my mom saw it as criticism.

And some people think Temple Grandin outgrew her autism because of how well she lives and functions and she has a sense of humor. You can laugh at what she says and she won't get upset. She can laugh at herself. It could have been a skill she's learned. With ASD people, you have to try and not laugh or else they will get upset with you. I think because they can't tell if you are laughing with them or at them.

Hmm...seems like the same thing could be said about me. Autism just doesn't seem like something that can be "outgrown" though like a pair of jeans - it stays with you throughout your entire life, and I don't feel any less autistic now than when I was a child. The difference now is that I became more anxious and self-conscious about my behaviors and learned how to adapt to those of other people so that I would seem "normal". And I'm certainly not "cured", as some people actually thought Dr. Grandin was when she was a young adult. I think you're absolutely right in thinking that these were merely skills that she learned, because I learned them too. And it frustrates me to absolutely no end that people will deny my autism because they think we are incapable of learning these skills - that somehow we're just too mentally ret*d or something to be able to grasp them and incorporate them into our lives like everyone else, so therefore if I'm functioning this well I can't be autistic and never was. That's not the point. The point is they don't come as naturally and instinctively to us as they do to other people. So we have to work at it a little harder.

I remember one of my friends in college had a crush on someone, but was a little too open about his diagnosis to her (she was a psych major and thought she knew all she needed to about this kind of stuff), and, callously showing her disinterest in him, she flat-out said "If you were really autistic, you wouldn't be functioning this well," and walked off. That kind of stuff really pisses me off more than anything. I guess to sum up, I just wish people gave us more credit for what we can do than what we can't.